Nicolas Langlitz, Ph.D.

Arbeitsvorhaben

Is There a Place for Psychedelics in Late Modern Societies?

Psychedelic drugs were prohibited around 1970—partly for public health reasons, partly for political ones. Their repression was bound up with the conflict between counterculture and establishment. Since the 1990s, researchers have worked to bring them back: first into mainstream science by capitalizing on the excitement around neuroscience during the “Decade of the Brain,” then into mainstream society through medicalization. In 2012, I published Neuropsychedelia, an ethnography of the preclinical phase of this revival. At the Wissenschaftskolleg, I’m planning to write a second book on the psychedelic renaissance, which follows its clinical phase, as part of a transdisciplinary project funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research on the ethical, legal, and social aspects of psychedelic therapies. It examines the changing normative space in which psychedelics have historically and recently been used.
The book builds on what I call the moral psychopharmacology of psychedelics. Psychedelics have been reported to induce mystical experiences “beyond good and evil” and to function as non-specific amplifiers of whatever attitudes and expectations users bring to the experience. As they reach more diverse and polarized publics, this context-dependence generates urgent bioethical questions that regulatory agencies, focused exclusively on the safety and efficacy of drugs, are not equipped to address. Ideologically, the psychedelic renaissance now sponsors projects ranging from neo-animism and ecofeminism to the healing of racial trauma, right-wing populism, and the MAHA movement in the US.
The book will bring psychopharmacology into conversation with the historical and ethnographic archive of psychedelic cultures, and will engage the growing body of humanist scholarship on psychedelics. It addresses contentious normative questions, and asks how psychedelic drugs might find a place in late modern societies without repeating the mistakes of the 1960s.

Recommended Reading

Langlitz, Nicolas. Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain. University of California Press, 2012.
–. Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature Alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Langlitz, Nicolas, and Clemente de Althaus. “The Moral Economy of Diversity: How the Epistemic Value of Diversity Transforms Late Modern Knowledge Cultures.” History of the Human Sciences 37, no. 1 (2024): 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951231166533.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Langlitz, Nicolas (Palo Alto, Calif., 2025)

What ever happened to the Anthropology of Science? : From the science wars to post-truth era

Langlitz, Nicolas (Basingstoke, 2025)

Experiments in medicalization : psychedelic therapy in Switzerland and Australia

Langlitz, Nicolas (Dordrecht, 2024)

Psychedelic therapy as form of life

Langlitz, Nicolas (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2023)

The moral economy of diversity : how the epistemic value of diversity transforms late modern knowledge cultures

Langlitz, Nicolas (Hoboken, NJ, 2023)

The making of a mushroom people : toward a moral anthropology of psychedelics beyond hype and anti-hype

Langlitz, Nicolas (Lausanne, 2023)

What good are psychedelic humanities?

Langlitz, Nicolas (Basingstoke, 2022)

Psychedelic innovations and the crisis of psychopharmacology

Langlitz, Nicolas (lausanne, 2021)

Moral psychopharmacology needs moral inquiry : the case of psychedelics

Langlitz, Nicolas (Chicago, Ill., 2021)

If only there was a department of fieldwork in philosophy

Langlitz, Nicolas (Chicago, Ill., 2020)

Devil’s advocate : sketch of an amoral anthropology